Abstract — Chiptune refers to a collection of related music production and performance practices sharing a history with video game soundtracks. The evolution of early chiptune music tells an alternate narrative about the hardware, software, and social practices of personal computing in the 1980s and 1990s. By digging into the interviews, text files, and dispersed ephemera that have made their way to the Web, we identify some of the common folk-historical threads among the commercial, noncommercial, and ambiguously commercial producers of chiptunes with an eye toward the present-day confusion surrounding the term chiptune. Using the language of affordances and constraints, we hope to avoid a technocratic view of the inventive and creative but nevertheless highly technical process of creating music on computer game hardware. Continue reading

Check this out if you haven’t already. It’s a tribute to bedroom musicians. Employing user-submitted YouTube content as his sole building blocks, Israeli musician and producer Kutiman assembled ThruYOU — a mini-album’s worth of A/V material with revelatory results. Kutiman carefully credits all of the musicians he samples, giving many unknowns a good 15 minutes of fame. Continue reading

Recycling_Sampling_Jamming. Artistic Strategies Now Festival/ Symposium Re-* :: February 26-28, 2009 :: Academy of Arts, Hanseatenweg 10, Berlin-Tiergarten.

The interdisciplinary festival seeks to examine through lectures, concerts, videoscreenings and an acoustic bar the artistic cross-media practices of Recycling, Sampling and Culture Jamming, which rely on the repetition and recreation of the Old and the transformation in the New. Reputable scientists and international artists from music, arts, netarts, film, design and advertising will exemplify at the Academy of Arts, Berlin, the current cultural and political relevance as well as the distinctions of these strategies. Continue reading

sonicstate.com offers a new series called The Art of Sampling. The first part, called The Pioneers of Sampling, runs from 1900 to 1970, and includes a 5:12 minute video.

From the text: … Before digital sampling, sound manipulation was seen as a subversive and avante garde activity. Composers were ostracized for experimenting with found sound sources and a belief that music could exist outside the strict confines of the classical or popular domain. Yep, life was an exciting adventure if you were a liberal minded avante garde experimentalist trying to scratch a living back in the early 1900’s. And this is where our story begins. With the pioneers of sampling. Continue reading

David Morneau will bring his composition-a-day project, 60×365, to an end on June 30th. You can hear the conclusion by visiting http://60×365.com

Every day for the past year, Morneau has composed and posted a new sixty-second composition. That’s just over six hours of new music in sixty-second installments. For this project, Morneau explored a wide variety of musical styles and techniques, including musique concrète, sine wave synthesis, digital sampling, 8-bit constructions, process music, acousmatic composition, and post-techno beat manipulations. He found the requirement to make a new, complete piece every day an exhilarating challenge, and reveled in the constant variety of ideas the project embraced. This project began as a challenge to compose more, and ended up as an audio diary of the past year. Continue reading

Last fall I posted about espaceSONO, a sound art show at the SAT in Montreal curated by Tobias c. van Veen. Tobias is an old friend who is active as a musician and DJ, curator and critic and in his spare time he plugs away on his Ph.D in communication & philosophy at McGill. I have wanted to interview Tobias about his creative practice for a while, but we have held off having this dialog for several months so we could specifically address his new turbulence-commissioned project, ’til death do us a part. Tobias will be performing this piece and participating in the Programmable Media II symposium in New York City (today) at Pace University.

Greg Smith: Your recently launched turbulence piece ’til death do us a part is decidely lo-tech. Not only is underlying reel-to-reel technology slightly archaic but even your references are coated with a fine layer of dust. Listening through the piece, it feels very much like an autopsy for “dead media.” Could you talk about the inspiration for the piece? Continue reading on Serial Consign.

Diapason gallery for sound and intermedia presents Alessandro Bosetti and Christian Kesten’s Mask/Mirror, a performance :: March 29, 2008; 8:00 pm :: Diapason, 882 Third Avenue (between 32nd and 33rd Street), 10th floor, Brooklyn, NY.

A few months ago I wrote a note to myself: “Try to create a mask that that doesn’t have anything to do with anything” and kept wondering what that could mean until I started to imagine Mask/Mirror. Mask/Mirror a sampler to process recordings of spoken language in real time… The sampler follows both sound and meaning criteria in sorting, organizing and processing samples and in formulating utterances. Continue reading

[Image: Solomon Linda and the Evening Birds, ca. 1941] Song of Solomon — by Ralph Borland and Julian Jonker — is an aleatoric audio collage and 8-channel installation that samples many versions of Mbube, aka Wimoweh aka The Lion Sleeps Tonight, in a sonic tribute to the song’s dead author Solomon Linda. By fragmenting and reordering compositional fragments of this ’song of songs’, the installation questions the assumptions about compositional innovation and imitation that inform Western intellectual property law. In this jungle of sounds, the dead Author rests.